4 Social Media Myths for Businesses

Myth #1: Small Businesses Must be on Social Media

A recent study found that 31% of small business owners said they don’t use social media because their customers don’t use it. If that’s the case, find where your customers are and the best way to reach them there.

Warren Sukernek, partner and vice president of strategies at Lift9, said there’s a rush to get on Twitter and launch a blog without a plan. He stressed that spending time up front doing analysis, research, and goal setting will make a social media plan easy to execute.

He recommended first getting active as a lurker on different social media networks to see what’s happening and what people are saying. For example, check out what other companies are doing on Twitter and then assess what you like and don’t like.

Sukernek also pointed out that social media fits more naturally for certain types of businesses, but that doesn’t mean other businesses shouldn’t be on there. It may just take more time to build an audience.

“I wouldn’t dissuade that B2B company from dipping a toe in. It might make sense to dip a toe in a different pool of water,” he said. He suggested that being on an industry-specific forum or LinkedIn might work better in some cases than being on Twitter.

Depending on what the goals are, gathering competitive intelligence might turn out to be what’s most valuable to a business, according to Sukernek.

“It’s hard to put a price tag on that,” he said.

Myth #2: Set It and Forget It

Don’t expect a case of build it and they will come. Sukernek compared it to building a brick-and-mortar store and not putting a sign on the outside.

“You’ve got to promote it,” he said.

Cross promote your web site with the pages you set up on social media sites. Sukernek advised integrating these social media sites into your business’ offline activities. For example, a retailer should list their fan page URL and Twitter name along with its company’s web site.

Time spent on social media efforts depends on the type of business and the goals involved, according to Sukernek. Goals should be distilled down to revenue and key performance metrics.

“Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Set some reasonable, manageable objectives,” he said.

Myth #3: Word of Mouth Presence Isn’t There

Sukernek said small businesses think that if no one is talking specifically about their company on social networks, they don’t need to be there. He disagrees.

“They’re talking about subjects that are germane to the brand,” he said.

On the other hand, what if your small business is being talked about on social media in a bad way? Sukernek said people are probably already doing that, and suggests it’s better for small businesses to be aware of it and address it directly on those platforms.

Myth #4: Social Media is Only for Broadcasting Messages

Treating social media as a one-way communication channel is an approach that’s doomed to fail. Check in with your fans and followers by asking for feedback, responding to questions and comments, and being personable to build relationships with customers.

“It’s conversational. It’s dialogue,” Sukernek said.

Concerns of small businesses on social media aren’t much different than those of large companies. For those businesses that aren’t careful, subscribing to these social media myths can result in some big mistakes.

Learn more at The Media Zoo.

Best Way to Measure Video ROI

Question: What is the best way to measure ROI on an online video campaign?

Answer: Using an analytics platform is an ideal way to track a campaign’s success because it gives marketers real-time intelligence that will allow them to continually optimize the cam-paign and ensure the highest ROI. For example, if you know that the bulk of your Web traffic is coming from ads placed on a particular site, you can increase efforts there and increase overall campaign effectiveness. The most appealing aspect of using analytics software is that it combines data from all sites so that, if advertisers are running a multiplatform campaign, they can assess the entire campaign through one analytics dashboard.

Search engine rankings are also a quick way to gauge an online campaign’s success. Since search engines now crawl and rank sites based on blended content—including images, video and audio—tracking how your ranking for various branded keywords changes over the course of an online video campaign is a great place to start.

Another benchmark of success is the traction video content gets on aggregator sites such as YouTube, MetaCafe and Blinkx. In addition to monitoring how many people watch your video, these sites allow viewers to tag, bookmark, rank and comment on videos. Such feedback is another invaluable way to gauge how video content is being perceived online.

Brand interaction is another effective way to monitor the success of an online video campaign. Several metrics can be used to address brand interaction: Tracking how long viewers watch an advertisement, what percentage of the video clip viewers watch and how often they see an advertisement can provide valuable information to online marketers. For example, if users consistently watch only a small percentage of a video ad, marketers might want to try A/B creative testing or change media placements.

By combining the above data, marketers can have a real idea of how much traction their online video campaign is garnering. The more information, the better off marketers will be.

Learn more at The Media Zoo – Video.

7 Small Business Marketing Tips

1. Don’t Advertise Like a Big Business
Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can’t afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales …now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising – and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.

2. Offer a Cheaper Version
Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.

3. Offer a Premium Version
Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service …or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.

4. Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods
Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

5. Trim Your Ads
Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions.

6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses
Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.

7. Take Advantage of Your Customers
Your customers already know and trust you. It’s easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers …and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.

Learn more at The Media Zoo.

5 E-Commerce Site Tips

1. Think like a consumer, and put your products in more than one category. The online businesses that make their goods and services easy to find reap rewards in two ways: People purchase more and they experience greater overall satisfaction with the Web site. Consider up sell and cross sell opportunities by offering products that make logical sense together. If you sell paintings and frames, show the frames that best complement the paintings. If you sell a line of products that have a wide range of prices, show the progression from the least expensive to the most expensive. Customers may choose to purchase the higher priced items if they’re presented as options.

2. Keep it simple. Many people cite overly complicated navigation or too many pages in the purchase path as reasons they don’t complete their online sale or abandon their shopping cart. Successful eCommerce sites simplify the checkout process and display clear pricing and shipping information. They also post clear return policies and access to customer service. Putting your brick and mortar store’s phone number in a visible place on your Web site is a good idea. Studies suggest that consumers feel more confident knowing you’re just a phone call away if they have a question or if there’s a problem with their order.

3. A picture really is worth a thousand words, so use photos of your products and go easy on the text. Online usability studies suggest that people do not read; they scan. It’s 25% harder to read on the Web, so keep these guidelines in mind for optimum readability: Headlines should be 8 words or less, shoot for 9-12 words on a line (people don’t want to read across the entire screen), keep sentences short (15-20 words) and try to keep summaries under 30 words and hold paragraphs to 40-70 words. In this way you can maintain compelling product descriptions alongside your product offerings.

4. Market your site once it’s live. It’s not enough to just build a Web site. You need to make an effort to market and promote your Web site to new and existing customers. Collect email addresses on your site to help you keep in touch with customers and consider creating a newsletter. Seek links from other sites that complement yours. Optimize your site’s content for relevance and submit it to the major search engines. With ProStore, you’ve got an incredible built-in marketing opportunity in that you can promote your products to millions of eBay customers. Take advantage of this capability to reach a whole new set of customers.

5. Make payment processing easy. Online shoppers need a way to give you money online. That’s easy these days. You can accept credit card payments with either a PayPal account or an online merchant account. PayPal is ideal for anyone trying out the eCommerce waters since there’s less of an upfront commitment, but you may end up paying more per transaction. If you know from the beginning you’re going to have strong sales and lots of online transactions each month, you may want to consider setting up an online merchant account.

Learn more at The Media Zoo.

Why Online Video?

Video is so powerful because it showcases charisma and communication skills, allowing for transparency, which builds trust. Video is also powerful because it’s demonstrative, clearly depicting procedures, techniques or visual information such as charts and graphs. A web page is inferior because it can take a lot of text to explain a proceedure or concept where if you just show it in a video, it’s quick and easy, plus it is retained longer because it’s visual. Images stick better than words. Besides, it takes effort to read. Customers and prospects would much rather you spoon feed the information to them via multimedia. Listed below are the benefits of online video.

- Increase sales
- Lead generation
- Makes your website sticky and a repeat destination
- Can be used to educate
- Can be used in directories such as YouTube to drive customers to your website
- Can be used on your website to further qualify leads
- For online sales, video can close the sale
- For complex sales a video can take move prospect closer to closing
- PR vehicle for motion video news and announcements

Learn more at The Media Zoo – Video.

5 Social Media Tips for Businesses

Here are five tips to optimize your small business’ social networks to attract more customers online. Small business owners and marketers do not have the luxury of lots of free time to monitor social networks, so these tips are intended to help you be as efficient as possible.

#1: Make Your Profiles About More Than Just Your Industry

While you should be demonstrating expertise on your Facebook fan page and your blog, you should also be adding local context to this information. What does the information you are providing mean for your specific region?

If you are selling homes, provide information and links about the local area, as well as the real estate you are offering. As a small business, you are competing against large national news sources, so provide something the big guys can’t afford to give—local perspective.

#2: Offer Value

By far the most important tip to getting value from social media for your business is offering value to the customers you want to interact with. First, make sure your social media presences contain all the information a customer needs to find you on and offline, and provide a clear idea of what your business offers.

Second, define what you’ll be offering your potential customers in return for their attention and time. You can offer promotions or discounts specifically for fans of your Facebook page, for instance.

If you do not have the budget for special offers, make sure the content you are offering is valuable to the potential customers you are trying to reach. Envision the need you are filling for the target customer and serve the customer with useful information related to your business or industry.

#3: Show Consistency

Nothing is more likely to reduce the effectiveness of small business social media outreach than inconsistency and spotty participation. You can’t expect potential customers to revisit your Facebook profile if it is hasn’t been updated in the two weeks since they first visited, or expect them to make a purchase from your Twitter outreach if you only post 2 updates per month.

For example, Naked Pizza, based in New Orleans, messages its followers on Twitter 1 to 15 times per day. It is now receiving 20 percent of its total revenue from these interactions.

#4: Diversify and Connect

It takes some time investment on the front end, but reaching out on multiple social platforms—then connecting the different presences with the same themes and message—is crucial to reaching the most possible customers on social networks. You don’t want to replicate the same message on every platform, either. Though services like ping.fm are great for simplifying content posting, try to add something unique to each social media presence you maintain.

#5: Be Competitive

Observe your competition and their social media activity. If your business is the only one in your industry and region interacting on social networks, congrats, you’re ahead of the curve. But more likely than not, your competitors are experimenting on social networks, too. Observe what they are doing to grow their base. Which tactics are working? Which are not? This is exactly what you’d do in a competitive assessment offline, looking for ways to improve your process by evaluating your competitors.

Remember to stay persistent, as it takes time to establish robust presences on social media sites. If you act on these five tips in your social media outreach, you will leverage your time effectively, and see improved results from promoting your small business on social networks.

Learn more at The Media Zoo.

Top 10 YouTube Tips for Businesses

1. Create and Customize Your Channel

First things first, customizing your channel is well worth the time it will take to set it up. You should add your company’s branding, customize the colors to compliment your company’s look, and add relevant information and links. A channel setup also offers YouTube users the option to subscribe to your content via the click of one button and the option to search just your uploaded content. The channel structure also allows you to highlight just uploads, playlists, favorites or all.

2. Add Subtitles

Since March 2010 auto-captioning has been available to all YouTube users, so there’s no technical excuse not to. Doing so adds captions for the hundreds of millions of hearing impaired folk across the world, ensuring your content is accessible to anyone who’d like to watch it. It’s an easy enough process that uses voice recognition, the results of which can be (and frankly need to be) edited for accuracy.

3. Don’t Overuse Annotations

A recent “improvement” from YouTube is the ability to add comments that display over the top of the footage. Don’t be tempted to go down this route, the annotations look unprofessional, are a distraction to viewers and depending how overused they are, can be a downright annoyance. Sure, you want to grab people’s attention and make an immediate impression, but your video content and other info you’ve added to the site should be enough to not have to rely on extraneous text.

4. Act To Remove Offensive Comments

While you can’t stop trolls from adding nasty comments to your videos or channel, you have the power to delete offensive or spammy remarks from the worst offenders. Taking advantage of this option requires good judgment. It’s obviously not a great idea to instantly remove any negative or critical comments, especially relevant ones, but you can certainly remove any spam or comments that use offensive language. If challenged over the removal make a simple statement to the effect that such comments will not be tolerated. If you’re getting seriously spammed or abused by a particular person, you can also block that user, but this should be a last resort. There are also options open to you to moderate comments before they go live, so you can nip any nasties in the bud before they are posted.

5. Engage With the YouTube Community

Don’t be a YouTube island. After all, it’s a social platform, so be sure to check out other content on the site, favorite appropriate videos and make suitable YouTube “friends.” If you really can’t, or don’t want to associate your company with other companies or individuals, then think wider. Why not look at content or channels that cover your local area, or that are for a good cause that you/your company supports. As well as engaging with other users, be sure to keep up to date with YouTube’s own news. The site goes through some fairly major changes from time to time and adds new features on a regular basis, so it’s well worth following the official YouTube blog, at the very least, to be kept up to date with site and community news.

6. Organize Your Content

Be sure to organize your content to be viewer-friendly rather than just offer a linear stream of video uploads. Create playlists to group relevant videos together, or lump older content into time-related (March 2010, Spring 2010, etc) folders if that’s more relevant to your organization. Remember that YouTube offers users the option to embed entire playlists (in addition to individual videos) into external sites, so give the creation of them, their titles and description, some decent thought.

7. Don’t Overlook Tags

As with many other sites, YouTube’s content is organized on a tag word basis. It’s more than worth taking the time to add the correct tags to your videos. The beauty of a tag word system is that it works on the basis of logic, but also on the more-the-merrier principle as you can’t know what search terms people will use. Really try and brainstorm around the tags you’re adding. For example, if your company offers dog products add “puppy,” “pooch,” “mutt,” “hound,” etc, too. As far as categories go, YouTube offers around 15 to choose from. Obviously try to use the most relevant, but don’t be afraid to experiment if your content could fall into one or the other, but be sure to monitor how the different videos perform so you can make an educated decision about categories in the future.

8. Promote Your YouTube Videos Elsewhere

Don’t assume viewers will come to you, or automatically think to look you up on YouTube. Every time you post a video that’s relevant for general sharing, blog about it, tweet it or add it to your Facebook (Facebook) Page. The last two actions are easy through YouTube’s account settings that automatically publishes news of a new video if you’ve linked up the social services. While YouTube is due to retire its “Link to Blog (blog)” option from the account settings soon, it’s easy enough to embed the relevant video in a blog post using HTML and will help push users towards your video content. In addition, don’t shy away from allowing embedding of your videos on other sites — the more views the better.

9. Use YouTube’s Free Analytics Tools

YouTube offers every user free analytics data via the “Insight” button on every uploaded video. This free-to-view info should not be overlooked as it can offer you some valuable info on not only views stats, but demographics, community, and the most useful — “discovery” data — info on how users came across the video, including the popular links they followed to get there. The tools are there – be sure to use them.

10. Don’t Neglect Your Channel

There are so many neglected YouTube channels, even from social, or web 2.0 firms that you’d think would realize the value in an up-to-date video resource for their company. While we’re by no means advocating needlessly creating video content, if you’re looking to go down the YouTube route then don’t let your resolve or enthusiasm for the service dwindle a couple of months in. Even if you have no new content to post, still keep logging in to stay on top of comments, friend requests, add favorites, etc, so as not to relegate your channel to the ranks of the unloved.

Learn more at The Media Zoo.